Civica Cashless Catering

[TheTiredITTech]

Hi All, 

 

Before the holidays we used the NRS Trustee/Civica cashless catering system hosted on premises. It wasnt brilliant, but it worked for our needs pretty well. Over the holidays we were migrated to their cloud version as it was cheaper than us paying to host our own (despite them presumably having to pick up hosting costs) with an engineer coming out to us before our first day- this never happened and our testing prior to starting with them uncovered significant holes that have rendered the system unusable. We are on day 3 and only today have we managed to get the Tills in a somewhat working state, but still with significant difficulties causing obscene amounts of manual data entry

 

Has anyone else had experience with trying to reach Civica support? The only number we have has a 45min - 1 hour hold time and doesnt get through to any engineers, only false promises of a call back, our emails left unanswered and the support portal tickets response time is about 24 hours just to re-request information we have sent over. We still havent had an engineer visit 3 days after it was promised 

Additionally, does anyone else who uses this system have notable latency? When our students scan their cards it was previously instant in loading their records, which Civica promised us will at most "increase by a second, maybe two" when the database was shifted to the cloud - sometimes cards scan in about 5 seconds (worse than promised but acceptable) and then the next card can take over 30 seconds. 

 

Thanks,

TTITT

[ovenchips]

I've had equally shocking support with them over the past few years. One of my schools uses Civica Cashless, last summer they migrated from on-prem to cashless cloud, it went fairly smoothly owing to the fact that we did actually get an onsite visit from the engineer; he was meant to be on site for the first service day as well but in the end just gave us his mobile number and helped remotely which was certainly better than nothing - unfortunately I don't think he works for them any more as we tried contacting him recently to no avail.

 

This summer the school changed payment provider, and we've had an absolute nightmare on the Civica side. The integration cost a considerable whack considering it was all digital, we were promised an engineer visit which never happened and they did the integration nearly a week late, conveniently on the day the school threatened to cancel as they wouldn't have time to complete the rest of the transfers to have it ready.

 

Since then multiple parts of the new integration don't work including no Y7 balances coming through, we can get 1st line responses via ticket after a couple of hours, but we've had to go directly to our account manager (who is now apparently on annual leave after asking us some initial troubleshooting questions) and are awaiting any further updates. This seems to be fairly regular for Civica, and you can only get actual actions completed if you get someone high up to shout loud enough at your account manager.

[Matt007a]

We moved from on-prem to cloud over the summer and are having loads of problems. Waiting an hour to get through on the phone only to speak to someone who has no idea what to do.

 

Our account manager promised to get us bumped up the list with support and nothing of the sort happened. I knew going in that Civica support were useless, but it's been really hard work this week. We've got laggy performance, balances not working, fingerprints not coming across and all they do is take your details, hang up and never call back.

 

They're equally slow to respond to tickets on their support page. I don't think the guy I'm talking to has the slightest clue how to fix our issues.

[TheTiredITTech]

I have just been down to witness the latency issues and its absolutely not fit for purpose even looking over the more fixable issues (Staff IDs not migrating so not having working mifare cards, till layouts wrong, reval units not connected, ParentPay not syncing etc). Definitely going to be pushing to get this back to on-site hosted or potentially a new provider!

 

Its a little comforting to know its not just an us issue, hopefully makes the conversations with the stakeholders easier! 

Edited September 5, 2025 by TheTiredITTech

[jezi55]

We have also moved to the cloud over the summer holidays, my advise is don't at the moment as it just doesnt work well. Been on hold multiple times a day. multiple tickets not getting answered in a reasonable fashion..

[Uni-Tech]

Has this improved lately- we are looking to migrate this summer?

[hallamke]

Whilst certainly not the biggest fan of Civica here, same as in the rest of this thread, long hold times on the phone (then sometiumes getting booted before its even answered). Tickets sitting in limbo for days at a time.

 

I Must say though that the last 3 support tickets I logged were dealt with with and resolved within an hour, so by that measure there seems to be an impreovement. 

 

Sadly I cant comment on the move to the cloud side as we are still packing a locally hosted server, but I know it will be something we will be considering in the not to distant future.

 

 

 

[lparry]

Our move to cloud was rough (tills not working, biometric server just shutting off causing fingerprints not to be recognised, weird reporting quirks, FSM issues)...

 

However these have been ironed out and to repeat what hallamke said, as of late the ticket resolution time seems to be same day rather than days/weeks so your experience should hopefully be better!